I guess my question is what the point of a citation is. My sense has always been that it's sufficient information for someone reading the biblio to find the source for herself.
You haven't been doing research in the physical sciences, have you? A lot of times our chem patrons will come to us with nothing more than Snape (1977) for a citation, because that's all they had in their article's reference list.
Bigger picture, I believe there'll eventually be some sort of paradigm shift in citation styles as more and more information becomes format-independent. The whole cite-your-online-source thing (including access date, URL etc.) is a reactive adjustment to the idea that web sites and database coverage change over time; nobody's quite gotten a handle on the fact that the individual article doesn't change just because a db has added or dropped it from the selection. And as more things are published exclusively online, the articles themselves may no longer be static. Citation styles are playing catch-up, and probably will be for quite some time to come.
no subject
You haven't been doing research in the physical sciences, have you? A lot of times our chem patrons will come to us with nothing more than Snape (1977) for a citation, because that's all they had in their article's reference list.
Bigger picture, I believe there'll eventually be some sort of paradigm shift in citation styles as more and more information becomes format-independent. The whole cite-your-online-source thing (including access date, URL etc.) is a reactive adjustment to the idea that web sites and database coverage change over time; nobody's quite gotten a handle on the fact that the individual article doesn't change just because a db has added or dropped it from the selection. And as more things are published exclusively online, the articles themselves may no longer be static. Citation styles are playing catch-up, and probably will be for quite some time to come.